The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [271]
I sit on my mother’s bed. My mother looks at me blankly. It is as if she doesn’t recognize me in this context. She says, finally, “Whose Greek fisherman’s cap is that?”
She is pointing to the Sony Walkman that I placed on the bed, along with an overnight bag and some magazines.
“That’s a machine that plays music, Ma.”
“No, it isn’t,” she says. “It’s a Greek fisherman’s cap.”
I pick it up and hold it out to her. I press “play,” and music can be heard through the dangling earphones. We both look at it as if it were the most curious thing in the world. I adjust the volume to low and put the earphones on her head. She closes her eyes. Finally, she says, “Is this the beginning of the Halloween party?”
“I threw you off, talking about Halloween,” I say. “Today’s just a day in early November.”
“Thanksgiving is next,” she says, opening her eyes.
“I suppose it is,” I say. I notice that Miz Banks’s head has fallen forward.
“Is that thing over there the turkey?” my mother says, pointing.
“It’s your roommate.”
“I was joking,” she says.
I realize that I am clenching my hands only when I unclench them. I try to smile, but I can’t hold up the corners of my mouth.
My mother arranges the earphones around her neck as if they were a stethoscope. “If I’d let you be what you wanted that time, maybe I’d have my own private nurse now. Maybe I wasn’t so smart, after all.”
“This is just temporary,” I lie.
“Well, I don’t want to go to my grave thinking you blame me for things that were out of my control. It’s perfectly possible that your father was a bigamist. My mother told me not to marry him.”
“Gramma told you not to marry Daddy?”
“She was a smart old fox. She sniffed him out.”
“But he never did what you accuse him of. He came home from the war and married you, and you had us. Maybe we confused you by growing up so fast or something. I don’t want to make you mad by mentioning my age, but maybe all those years that we were a family, so long ago, were like one long Halloween: we were costumed as children, and then we outgrew the costumes and we were grown.”
She looks at me. “That’s an interesting way to put it,” she says.
“And the other family—maybe it’s like the mixup between the man dreaming he’s a butterfly, or the butterfly dreaming he’s a man. Maybe you were confused after your stroke, or it came to you in a dream and it seemed real, the way dreams sometimes linger. Maybe you couldn’t understand how we’d all aged, so you invented us again as young people. And for some reason Tim got frozen in time. You said the other wife looked like you. Well, maybe she was you.”
“I don’t know,” my mother says slowly. “I think your father was just attracted to the same type of woman.”
“But nobody ever met these people. There’s no marriage license. He was married to you for almost fifty years. Don’t you see that what I’m saying is a more likely explanation?”
“You really do remind me of that detective, Desperate Mason. You get an idea, and your eyes get big, just the way his do. I feel like you’re about to lean into the witness stand.”
Jack Milrus, a towel around his neck, stands in the doorway. “In a million years, you’ll never guess why I’m late,” he says. “A wheel came off a truck and knocked my car off the road, into a pond. I had to get out through the window and wade back to the highway.”
A nurse comes up behind him with more towels and some dry clothes.
“Maybe it’s just raining out, but it feels to him like he was in a pond,” my mother says, winking at me.
“You understand!” I say.
“Everybody has his little embellishments,” my mother says. “There wouldn’t be any books to read to children and there would be precious few to read to adults if storytellers weren’t allowed a few embellishments.”
“Ma! That is absolutely true.”
“Excuse me while I step into the bathroom and change my clothes.”
“Humor him,” my mother whispers to me behind her hand. “When he comes out, he’ll think he’s a doctor, but you and I will know